‘Christ on a bike. What’s she gonna give him for Christmas? A kidney?’
Spam never spoke about virginity – she wasn’t the ‘little chat’ type. A pack of Dr Whites and a (larger) box of tampons had appeared in Baker’s wardrobe as if by magic about three months before the big day and that was pretty much that, apart, obviously, from Patsy Baker’s increasingly nutty Red Cross parcels.
Stottie’s mother was too obsessed with the grades and certificates earned by her scholarship-winning, smart-blazered offspring to say much about birds or bees, and Mrs McQueen rather felt that the school was being paid to take care of that side of the syllabus, but Bunty’s mother (who was over fifty) had a bit of a thing about ‘damaged goods’. Virginity or (at worst) apparent virginity was like the cellophane on a packet of fags or the tiny stamp sealing a deck of playing cards: its loss undermined potential resale value (‘discard if seal is broken’). A still unravished girl like Amanda, who really was quite presentable if she’d only make the effort, ought to be able to take her pick – but of course Mummy hadn’t been told about any of the Chelsea boys. Bunty always said she was going to the cinema with Amanda Stott, knowing full well that it would take a fairly major domestic emergency – another war; cat death; navy knickers in the white wash – for Mrs Bunter-Byng to ring Stottie’s house. The Stott girl was pleasant enough but Mrs S wasn’t really PLU. Queenie’s mother was more her thing: Queenie’s mother had an Hermès scarf knotted around the handle of her bag; Queenie’s mother played canasta.
The Bunter-Byngs had driven past Château Stott one Easter on the way to the airport: one of those terraced dog boxes on the old London road, ugly and made uglier by the nubbly tide of pebble-dash that had backsurged irresistibly through the suburbs just before the war. Cladding was what they all did now. Uglier, if that were possible.
The Stott house (did Mrs Bunter-Byng but know it) was equally nubbly on the inside because Pa Stott had rough-iced the walls and ceiling of the ground floor with Artex decorative plaster. Did it himself (not the best idea he’d ever had). It was painfully rough to the touch, and if by any chance – tiredness, Lambrusco, an unexpected slap in the face – you stumbled against a wall with bare skin, the surface left an angry graze. The ceiling hadn’t worn as well. Pa Stott did that himself too, but hadn’t done whatever needed doing before combing on the gunge so that when Amanda let her bath run over, the sitting room ceiling had come down in one crispy white piece, like a giant table water biscuit hanging from the light fitting. The builder called to fix it nearly died laughing, Stottie said.
‘Here.’ Bunty poked Baker with a chocolate flake. ‘Take away the taste of that detention.’ For all the world as if they were still on speaking terms.
‘Fattening. You eat it.’
‘Please yourself.’
Baker tucked the flake behind her ear. Bunty sighed crossly and began licking the sides of a large, ripe banana.
‘Oh blimey, look at her,’ laughed Queenie. ‘The Sensuous Female rides again.’ (Bunty had bought a copy of this at the airport last holidays when Mummy wasn’t looking and they had all borrowed it in turn: After you have mastered the Penis/Mouth ploy, add the Hummingbird Flick and the Silken Swirl.)
‘Put it a-way, Amanda.’
Baker scowled as she transferred her unwanted chocolate bar from her ear to her book bag. You became an expert banana-licker and then what? Some bloke would see you at it and immediately start chatting you up. All because your winning way with a piece of fruit had told him that sucking people off was your idea of a good time, and then you’d be obliged to deliver on your promise. Practically trades descriptions. Advertising standards.
‘You’re making a rod for your own back. It’s like learning shorthand: if they find out you know how then they’ll make you do it.’ Baker was very careful not to address this to anyone in particular and her eyes avoided the banana-munching Bunty.
‘And then he’ll tell everybody,’ said Queenie, ‘or write it on the side of the bus stop. That’s what my big brother did. Toe rag.’
‘No! Who was it?’
Queenie frowned. ‘Someone in the Lower Sixth if you must know – and before you ask I’m not telling. Bad enough Nigel telling bloody everybody. Poor cow.’
Queenie went back to the remains of her Mars Bar and there was an awkward silence with all three of them wanting to know but not wanting to ask, all three of them slightly shamefaced at Queenie coming over all mature about telling. Too juicy not to (you’d have thought) but she didn’t. You had to admire that – but you didn’t have to like it.
Bunty caved in first. ‘Bet it was Moggy Giles. Dominic got off with her at his last school dance. Access all areas, Dominic says.’
‘I’m saying nar-sing.’
‘Her sister’s nearly as bad. Only in the Upper Fourth.’
‘It’ll be the whore moans,’ said Baker, pulling The Female Eunuch from her bag and reading out the bit she had marked: ‘“Irritability, nightmares, bed-wetting, giggling, lying, shyness, weeping, nail-biting, compulsive counting rituals, picking at sores, brooding, clumsiness, embarrassment, secretiveness.”’
‘Yup,’ nodded Queenie, tearing cautiously at a hangnail. ‘Yup. That about covers it. Apart from the bed-wetting – though I’m sure that will come.’
Stottie was unconvinced. ‘Yeah, you say that, but our Stephanie’s showing no signs of any of it – apart from the compulsive counting lark, ob-viously – does a lot of that. Counts Smarties.’
‘Counting Smarties is normal,’ insisted Bunty. ‘She’s definitely got the spots though. Does she count those?’
As Bunty spoke the bell rang for the end of break and the girls in the playground below the bike shed began funnelling back inside.
‘Did you do the German homework?’
‘Am Zahnartzt. Who in their right mind would go anywhere near a German dentist? They never teach you anything useful; grown-up courses are miles better,’ said Stottie ‘“Two more gin and tonics and a pack of your finest rubber johnnies.”’
‘Spam’s firm are talking about sending her on a Spanish course,’ said Baker. ‘She can’t wait, but Dad says she’s wasting her time, says they all speaka di English anyway and you could learn the important bits on the plane from a phrasebook: “This shower does not work; this wine is undrinkable; these vegetables are not cooked.” Dad hates hotels; doesn’t matter where we go: it’s never “what a lovely room” or “this is delicious”.’
Tuesday’s German lesson was spent revising the dative while the German mistress ran back and forth to the staff room in search of the lead for the overhead projector so that she could show them some slides of the Schwarzwald (which was going to take time as the missing cable had been wedged down the back of the radiator).
‘How come we haven’t got a dative?’
‘Cutbacks.’
‘It’s like the goose step: they just do it to make life harder,’ said Queenie. ‘Character-building.’
‘Aus, ausser, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu, gegenüber,’ parroted Baker, unanswerably.
‘Two can play at that game,’ whispered Stottie. ‘Please remember every day, neuter plurals end in A.’
‘In March, July, October, May, the nones fall on the seventh day.’
‘Father Christmas goes down an escalator backwards,’ trumped Queenie.
‘Do what? You’re making these up,’ hissed Baker.
‘Am not. Something to do with musical keys? Or Chemistry? Might have been Chemistry.’
‘Thought you gave up Chemistry?’
‘Zackly my point.’
‘Why did you give it up?’ asked Stott, who had already whizzed through the dative exercise and was drawing an elaborate Greek key pattern all round the cover of her rough book.
‘It became necessary.’
Queenie was still in the proles when she developed her loathing of the periodic table, reacting first with blank disbelief then with blind panic to the news that she was expected to commit t
his seemingly random sequence of numbers and initials to memory.
‘You don’t have to learn logarithms or cosines. There’s a little book. It’s like being made to memorise a bus timetable of somewhere you don’t even live. In Greek.’
‘But there is a logic to it,’ insisted Stott. ‘Look at it. All the metals go here . . .’
‘Arsenic,’ suggested Baker.
‘No need to be nasty,’ Bunty, straight-faced, ‘she’s only trying to help.’
German was followed – just in case any of it stuck – by forty minutes of French conversation practising the future perfect (I/you/we will have murdered Miss Gray by next Tuesday).
‘Not what I’d call conversation.’ Stottie was off again.
Stottie, who had a knack for languages, was mid-way through teaching herself Italian in twenty lessons from her library book. It was taking slightly longer than promised but it was still a hell of a lot quicker than French.
‘“Quel est votre sujet préféré”? Is that really their idea of a conversation? I mean, picture the scene: you, Roger Vadim—’
‘Jean Paul Belmondo,’ purred Bunty, ‘he looks dir-ty.’
‘A corner table in a bistro, checked tablecloth, candle jammed into a wine bottle, an accordion wheezing away in the distance as you sip your Napoleon brandy. “Tell me, chérie,” he murmurs, lighting another little yellow French fag while you humming-bird flick your banana, “avez-vous des soeurs ou des frères?” I worked it out. A thousand French lessons: one a week from the age of seven; one a day the five years we’ve been here. Madame Dupont va a l’épicerie? It’s a total con. We should all be bi-bloody-lingual by now. A thousand hours down the bloody buggering drain. I’ve spent more time one-to-one with French teachers than I have with my dad. Far more.’ Stottie stopped, sad suddenly. ‘And why French anyway? Loads more places speak Spanish. Loads more people speak Russian. Did money change hands?’
‘“The language of international diplomacy” Miss Gray says.’
‘Oh yes, very likely. Has Miss Batty got a folder on that in her careers file? Data Processing, Dental Nursing, Diplomacy.’
Miss Revie was flicking through the matrix prep as they barged their way into Room 8 for Beta Maths.
‘Jolly well done everybody, getting all the matrix homework in, not bad, not bad at all.’
Had Miss Revie spotted the massed cheat? Not a chance. She tamped the sheaf of sheets against her desktop. Would the Maths monitor be a sport and hand them all back? And they must all remember tomorrow’s exam and the need for constant revision and could they all turn to the section on Topology and could someone please tell her the maximum number of odd nodes in a traversable system? (Surly silence.) Anybody?
Miss Revie’s good mood swung back to minus one. Hopeless. Thank heavens she was getting the Alphas next year, at least a few of them had an inkling, but God preserve her from fifteen-year-old girls who couldn’t do Maths, whose boring binty mothers could never do Maths, whose boring binty mothers had deliberately inoculated their daughters with their own superstitious dread of fractions, graphs, set squares, protractors and the entire contents of the Oxford Mathematical Instruments set, together with their pea-brained belief that Mathematics, like red hair or cystic fibrosis or a third nipple had some bona fide genetic component. This lot looked indignantly at each batch of equations as if the sums had been delivered in error, and the cheeky ones came right out and said, in their Neanderthal, proto-Benthamite way, that they were never going to need differential equations, Miss Revie, not in Real Life. As though the ability to find the determinant of a matrix, dissect a rat or parse a compound sentence were just so much excess baggage that would weigh them down on their breakneck race through life and must be hurled from the back of the sledge at the earliest possible opportunity.
Miss Revie slumped down in front of the projector and picked up her pack of felt-tips.
‘Can you all turn to page seventeen.’
Baker opened her Maths book at the Topology chapter. There was a picture of a TV set next to a Dalek and a caption pointing out that they were topologically equivalent, plus a short hymn in praise of the London Tube map.
Bunty was flicking crossly through her own textbook. ‘There’s a whole chapter on Practical Mathematics in the back here,’ she hissed, ‘all the stuff I can do: compound interest, percentages, how many bathroom tiles to buy. All that malarkey. Not even on the syllabus. I’m never going to need this rubbish.’ Bunty was almost squealing with frustration as she unconsciously trotted out Miss Revie’s unfavourite phrase. ‘There already is a bloody Tube map. And if they wanted a new one they’re never going to ask me are they?’
‘Not with your job in the diplomatic corps, chérie. Far too busy.’
Baker leaned back in her chair, opened her rough book and began writing ‘kill julia smith’ in very small capital letters over and over and over until it filled the page. That bitch was everywhere. By now she would have run the Drumlin to earth and told her that Baker hadn’t managed to see the headmistress and the Drumlin would probably bring it up in the Thursday staff meeting and Mrs Mostyn would add her two pennyworth and they’d phone Dad or write to Dad or fire off some smoke signals to Dad to say that Baker wasn’t keeping to her side of the ‘contract’ and it wasn’t the plimsolls it was the principle of the thing and he would shout and pull his face into cross, crumpled shapes and tell her she was just like her bloody mother.
One day, thought Baker, one day he’ll trot out that rubbish again about apples not falling far from trees, he’ll say it again and I will murder him and it will all be Julia’s fault. Fucking Julia. Her Biro went through the paper. No one else hated their parents this much. Unless they did. Maybe they did? Maybe that was why people sighed at sentimental pictures and cried at The Railway Children (‘Daddy! My daddy!’). In mourning for the families they hadn’t had.
She could see Dad’s Monday night face in her head, see the girlishly long cowlick of hair flopping sweatily forward. She could see his teeth (you couldn’t as a rule), chubby and yellow like sucked buttermints and stained with strong tea and tobacco that silted up the grooves where they met. She could feel the germy sparks of spit that flew around whenever he started shouting. Father-like he tends and spares us? Oh really?
‘So,’ Dad always said when he finally finished, ‘have you got much homework?’ Like someone had pulled a string at the back of his neck.
Queenie had had a lot of talking dolls when she was small. She brought them all to school once: Ken (Barbie’s boyfriend), Stacey (their chatty chum), and evil Captain Black off some Thunderbirds thing and the Mandies spent a happy breaktime making up a dolly drama.
‘I think mini skirts are smashing; Barbie and I are having tea; Oh dear. What shall I wear for dinner?’ said Stacey who sounded just like the Queen.
‘We will take our revenge,’ vowed Captain Black.
‘Let’s go listen to Barbie’s records,’ drawled Ken in a desperate bid to lighten the mood.
‘Everyone will die,’ warned the Captain, implacably.
Barbie had a talking boyfriend, a talking friend, a talking enemy but no sign as yet of a talking dad.
‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’
‘Have you written a thank you letter?’
‘Take that stuff off your face.’
‘Apologise to your mother.’
‘We will take our revenge.’
Chapter 6
‘I hate my stepmother.’
‘Well just eat the potatoes.’
Queenie was poking suspiciously at her lunch plate with a fork. ‘Is this really what they eat in Lancashire?’
‘Probbly. All food has to be named after somewhere. Well-known fact: Bakewell tart; Oxford marmalade. All cheese. Biscuits.’
‘Biscuits?’
‘Lincoln, Shrewsbury, Bath Olivers, Nice, Garibaldi.’
‘Gari-baldi? Wezzat?’
‘Near Nice.’
Bunty peered hungrily at B
aker’s plate. ‘Are you not going to eat that?’ She smiled a little guiltily at Baker – like they were still friends – and began helping herself to the untasted hotpot.
‘Your stepmother can’t be all bad,’ said Queenie. ‘Not if she wants shot of the piano.’
‘Yeah, but she isn’t doing it for my sake, it’s not about me. She just wants a bigger telly and there isn’t room.’
‘I don’t see why you want to get rid of it. I wish mine was as nice,’ gushed Stottie. ‘And you’re really good – you can play anything.’
Baker looked down at the remaining yellow discs of potato and pinkish shreds of meat in their puddle of brown grease.
‘Spam makes hotpot: special hotpot.’
Queenie sucked air in through her teeth. ‘Never good news, “special”. Special fried rice is always a no-no: peas and prawns and what have you; chopped up leftovers. Nass-ty.’
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if she could bring herself to stick to a proper recipe. It’ll look normal and then you’ll discover too late that she’s put curry powder in it, or raisins. She puts raisins in salad for Christ’s sake.’
Queenie shuddered. ‘I tried to get Mummy to write the day’s menu up on the kitchen blackboard. You feel such a prannet asking all the time. Sounds rude: “Wossis then?” and what with the Cordon Bleu course it’s always Allah something, so it’s not like you could guess or anything.’
‘Mine doesn’t do recipes, thank God,’ said Bunty. ‘Just grills steak, mashes potato and heats up frozen green things. Delish. And if Dad’s off broking somewhere we have hoops on toast and Antarctic Roll.’
‘Arctic, surely,’ corrected Stottie.
‘Same difference.’
‘Even Spam’s specials are better than this Lancashire muck. And another thing: why am I eating off lino?’ Baker banged her hand on one of the fake marble tiles glued along the tops of the trestle tables. ‘Like eating off the floor. Feel like the bloody dog.’ She pushed her plate away untouched.
The others had moved on to pudding which was tinned fruit and a small brick of ice cream.
The Following Girls Page 7